The XMEN Clan Forums

Erk. Well, for the past month or two the ol' PC has been acting a little unstable (due to Spore, maybe?). Not really surprising, since this particular install of Windows XP had been serving me well for several years, and I'd transplanted motherboards and migrated it to new hard drives and (un)installed uncounted varieties of hardware, drivers, and software. I've tried a few things to fix it up, but without much result. To all appearances, my PC was still very clean which makes it a little puzzling. Anyway, I got tired of stuff crashing on me and textures going wonky and stuff, and figured it was only a matter of time before the crashes started corrupting something important. Sooo....

Here I am on the dark side. I've just bought a shiny new hard drive and have installed Vista 64-bit. I'll finally see how well we get along. Currently downloading drivers for hardware, then I can start seeing about my software and moving data over. What joy!

So far, so good. Got most of the drivers done; probably have a few odd ones here and there left. Firefox & Thunderbird installed. LOTRO installed and updating. Steam installed, tested TF2, all great, pulling down a couple more Steam games. Stardock Impulse (similar to Steam) installed and downloading. Yes, my pipe ot the 'net is likely going to be quite full for a while... Old hard drive is installed as secondary and accessible.

Next up is getting application data, particularly my local email folders moved over, installing camera and imaging software, some other games (like Fallout).

Im waitin for Windows 7. Im seriously hoping its going to be better.

One preview of Windows 7 I read said that it was what Vista should have been, and focused mostly on the fact that it seemed faster. Actual time trials showed that it wasn't faster, but the UI didn't stop for every little thing like it did with XP and does with Vista.

Still, so far so good. Got some data transferred over, a few games installed. Installing more stuff now. It'll get interesting when I start getting into some of the much older stuff, I'm sure, but for now haven't had a bit of a problem. I have some Ubisoft games like Pacific Fighters that were crashing due to some sound issues under XP (some sort of driver thing, most likely) that seems to be all cleared up now.

Bah. Fallout3 still freezes a lot. So definitely either hardware or the program itself (and from forum reports, I'm assuming the latter).

I have had no issues with any games so far, so I am pretty happy. Only thing really slowing me down is I have 2 SATA drives and 2 IDE drives and the older drives take a bit to respond sometimes. I am going to buy a couple of 1TB drives soon and consolidate my holdings for better response hopefully.

cool gambutt.

Hope things keep rollin smooth

Found something that Just Won't Work. It's a little folder called "Microsoft Arcade" that I've been towing around since, I guess, Windows 3.1. Problem is these guys are apparently 16-bit apps, and Vista 64 just doesn't like 'em. Not that these little games are a big deal, but I did a little research and while Vista 32 would run 'em, Vista 64 simply refuses to double-thunk down to 16-bit land. Only choice for the ancient stuff is an emulator.